Jobs at Code for America

• Technical Delivery

Craft new features that help users more easily navigate government services and receive a dignified experience.
Write automated tests and develop monitoring strategies to ensure a high level of service quality.
Work iteratively to ship minimal features, learn, and harden them to scale once proven
Contribute to design, implementation, and code review, and make technical trade-offs alongside your team, responsibly using AI-assisted development.
Own architecture and data-modeling decisions for significant parts of a production system, weighing tradeoffs across competing priorities — speed vs. maintainability, the familiar tool vs. the right one, ideal vs. feasible.
Support Engineering's culture of writing by producing quality documentation and learning materials for internal and external audiences.

• Criminal Justice, which focuses on Automatic Record Clearance,
• Tax Benefits, which focuses on free trustworthy tax services and simplified tax filing,

• Data Infrastructure & Pipeline Engineering

Lead cross-functional technical planning with Data Scientists, Software Engineers, and Product Managers to translate data architecture requirements into scalable technical solutions for your team's projects
Create new data pipelines, data transfers, and compliance-oriented infrastructure to facilitate seamless data utilization within cloud environments
Contribute to best practices for dataset management and optimization, ensuring data consistency and performance
Implement data transformation, integration, and validation processes to support analytics and reporting needs
Partner with our DevOps team to apply deployment standards, monitoring frameworks, and operational best practices for data infrastructure
Lead technical investigations into data issues within the systems you own, resolving them with thorough communication and recommending process changes where necessary.
Optimize and fine-tune data pipelines for improved speed, reliability, and efficiency
Lead generation and optimization of data architecture recommendations and demonstrate the ability to implement them
Champion privacy, security, and data governance practices throughout the entire data lifecycle
Support Engineering's culture of writing by producing quality documentation and learning materials.

• Delivery Standards & Practice Ownership

Own and continuously improve Code for America's delivery methodology, including project management standards, tools, templates, playbooks, and governance frameworks
Set and drive strategic priorities for delivery infrastructure investment in alignment with senior leaders — uplifting explicit tradeoffs about where standardization adds the most value and where over-prescribing would create friction rather than consistency ⁠— while bringing leaders and project teams along.
Design and maintain protocols for the full project lifecycle: information handoffs from the Partnerships team at cultivation close, project kickoff facilitation and team onboarding, scope revision processes, and project close-out.
Collaborate with product operations to leverage learnings and best practices for common processes across product and advisory work.
Own and administer delivery tooling (e.g., Asana, Airtable), including how it's configured, how projects are structured within it, and how it supports visibility into project effectiveness across the portfolio
Maintain a living library of easy-to-use delivery resources — templates, how-to guides, playbooks — that teams can access and apply without reinventing the wheel
Identify and integrate AI tools into delivery workflows where they can meaningfully improve consistency, efficiency, or quality of execution, modeling responsible adoption for the broader team

• Team Management & Growth

Lead, coach, and develop the engineers on your team through regular check-ins and clear, candid feedback; create growth opportunities and stretch assignments that build new technical and professional skills.
Provide oversight of technical delivery across 2–3 projects your team contributes to, monitoring progress, identifying and mitigating risks, and driving to successful, durable outcomes.
Mentor staff on best practices and sound technical judgment, and lead by example, establishing patterns others on the team follow.
Actively create opportunities for engineers to own meaningful work, with clear expectations and the accountability that lets them grow into it.
Proactively address conflict directly and promptly; mediate disagreements between team members.
Recruit and retain engineering talent with the skill, mission commitment, and appetite for innovation to thrive at Code for America.

• Technical Delivery

Craft new features that help users more easily navigate government services and receive a dignified experience, taking on the hardest and highest-leverage problems across your domain and modeling the standard other engineers build toward.
Drive solutions to technical problems that are ambiguous or undefined, weighing tradeoffs across competing priorities at a discipline-wide scale.
Own architecture and data-modeling decisions for systems that span multiple services or teams, weighing tradeoffs across competing priorities: speed vs. maintainability, the familiar tool vs. the right one, ideal vs. feasible.
Work iteratively to prove out approaches, then engineer what works into durable, reusable capabilities (shared services, libraries, and AI-enabled components) that other teams build on.
Support Engineering's culture of writing by producing documentation, technical decision records, and learning materials that engineers across multiple teams rely on.

• Portfolio Oversight

Own partnership escalation and/or strategic direction across a portfolio of approximately four to six projects, ensuring each project meets its commitments to government partners, funders, and clients, and outputs are high-quality and delivered on time and within budget.
Collaborate with the Partnerships team to ensure efficient scoping and smooth handoffs, including clear kickoff processes and well-defined responsibilities during project kickoffs and transitions.
Ensure programs staff apply consistent delivery management practices, focused on setting clear project timelines and goals, clarifying roles, and running appropriate meeting cadences, leveraging Code for America's standard best practices, tools, and processes.
Ensure ongoing project-level direction & strategy aligns with organizational strategy, ensuring your portfolio advances mission priorities and contributes to measurable client outcomes.
Work with programs team members, programs leadership, and discipline leads to ensure each project has a clear, realistic plan for success aligned with organizational goals, partner expectations, client outcomes, and/or philanthropic commitments, and that programs staff understand how to drive aligned progress.
Anticipate risks, staffing needs, and resource constraints across your portfolio; serve as the primary escalation point for APDs and programs staff , escalating to programs leadership when the decision has implications beyond your purview.
Support APDs in driving clear, frequent communication internally and with external stakeholders to maintain alignment on program progress, scope changes, risks, and emerging opportunities.
Partner with programs and resource management leadership to ensure project teams are staffed appropriately from a programs perspective; contribute to headcount recommendations and support recruitment and onboarding of new team members.
Ensure APDs serving as Project Sponsors surface staffing needs across delivery disciplines early and escalate when tradeoffs or reprioritization are required. Proactively flag when teams need resource adjustments to ensure strong delivery across multiple teams.

• AI Governance & Policy
  

Own the full lifecycle of Code for America's AI Acceptable Use Policy: drafting foundational policy from the ground up, socializing it across the organization, driving adoption, and revising it on an ongoing basis as tools, risks, and best practices evolve
Advise on the employee-facing implications of AI tool deployment, including acceptable use boundaries, monitoring practices, and policy provisions that intersect with employment law and workforce relations — working in close coordination with People Operations and Legal.
Write governance frameworks and policy documents in accessible, plain-language formats — ensuring that staff at all levels and across all disciplines can understand and act on guidance, not just compliance and IT teams
Serve as an internal consultant to teams in the early stages of exploring, piloting, or refining AI-assisted workflows — guiding experimentation with a "yes, and here's how to do it safely" orientation
Document and share learnings from team-level pilots to build organizational knowledge and surface replicable patterns
Act as a liaison between IT/security and non-technical program and operations teams, translating between contexts and representing staff needs when governance or tooling decisions are being made
Partner with People Operations and Legal on the development and ongoing review of AI-related employment policies, including policies that govern employee conduct, monitoring, and use of AI tools in the workplace — ensuring governance frameworks are informed by and aligned to employee relations considerations.
Lead change management for AI-related transitions — helping staff understand not just what is changing, but why, and what it means for their work